The Black Knight Chronicles

by John G. Hartness

  When I got to the hospital, Tommy had some company that I certainly wasn’t interested in seeing—the police. I did a quick one-eighty in the hallway once I saw the guard outside his room and headed back downstairs to swipe a disguise. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid masquerading as someone with medical training, because someone always wants you to do something with that training, and that can turn out poorly for you and the patient. So I usually put on my best janitor clothes and grab a bucket. There’s never been a hospital that didn’t have something that needed to be mopped, and the cleaning staff is usually invisible. Even if someone does notice you, they’re just happy to see you working their floor.

  I found an unattended supply closet on Tommy’s floor and commandeered a bucket and mop. I wheeled my way down the hall to the room next to Tommy’s, and headed in to mop and eavesdrop. Fortunately for me, the guy in the room was comatose and didn’t care that I was doing a crappy cleaning job. I was able to hear a grumpy-sounding female detective grilling Tommy through the wall.

  “Mr. Matthews, how exactly did you break your arm?” she asked.

  “Fell off my skateboard.” Tommy had the sullen teenager thing down pat, probably because he wasn’t acting. He was a teenager with a crap attitude toward authority figures and a system full of painkillers.

  “That’s bull!” I heard her slam something to the floor, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who was playing the bad cop. If she was playing. “The doctor told us your injuries were consistent with your arm being broken by a very strong person. Now who did it?”

  “I told you, I fell off my skateboard.” Tommy even managed a little whine at the end. I was impressed. I wasn’t anywhere near that good at being a putz when I was a kid.

  “And I told you, I know you’re lying.” I could almost see her leaning toward him. Her voice dropped and became confidential, inviting. “We can’t protect you if you don’t tell us the truth, Tommy. And you want us to protect you, don’t you? I’d hate to have to leave here and take that guard with me. Wouldn’t you?”

  I certainly wouldn’t hate that, but she wasn’t asking me.

  I heard nothing for a minute, then heard Tommy take a deep breath and say, “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.” My heart, if it still beat, would have stopped for a second, and Tommy’s next words did nothing to make me feel any better. Before I could reach through the wall and strangle him, he said “I hired a couple of vampire detectives to protect me from a demonic curse, and when we went to confront the witch that cursed me, she broke my arm like a twig.”

  The silence from the other room was thick, and I leaned my head against the wall berating myself for not eating the kid when I had the chance. After a long minute I heard the woman’s voice again, and it was pretty obvious that she was not happy with Tommy’s answer. She spit out the words like they were bullets. “You little bastard. I have somebody in this town kidnapping little kids, and this girl is the latest. Now, you were seen harassing her at school and the neighbors say a kid matching your description was at her house before she went missing last night.”

  “You know something about this. If anything happens to that little girl and it turns out you had anything to do with it, I will personally make sure that you do your undergraduate work at the federal penitentiary in Raleigh.” With that, I heard her stomp toward the door. Seconds later I felt the wall shake as she slammed the door to Tommy’s room.

  “Come on, leave the chump here. Anything that’s after him can have him,” she said to the guard. Without a glance, they passed by the open door of the room I was mopping and headed for the elevator.

  The woman led the parade, followed by two uniforms. She was striking more than pretty, a little too sharp in the face for most guys’ comfort. Tall, with ass-kicking boots on she was almost six feet, her dark brown curls tied into a messy ponytail. She wore a tailored jacket open to show her badge and gun, and a cross around her neck.

  I notice the little things, like crosses. They get to be important. I counted to a hundred twice and then wheeled my bucket into Tommy’s room. He was fiddling with the bed when I closed the door behind me and moved a chair under the knob. I didn’t need any nurses coming in to take fluids while Tommy and I had a heart-to-heart.

  “Holy crap!” Tommy cried. “I almost peed the bed! I thought you guys had left me here to die!”

  I crossed the room as quickly as I could, which is pretty damned quick, and put my hand over his mouth. “You want to yell that a little louder? I’m not sure every brat in the nursery heard you,” I whispered into his face. His eyes got big as he noticed the pointy teeth, and I backed off a little. “How long were they here? What did they tell you? Start at the beginning and walk me through.”

  “They were here when I woke up. That chick cop was a real bitch. She was all about wanting to know how my arm got broke, but I didn’t tell her anything, I swear.” He flopped back onto his pillows looking proud of himself.

  “Except the absolute truth, you mean. Good thing for all of us she’s a civilian and doesn’t believe in anything having to do with our world.” Tommy looked a lot less smug, and I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Vamp senses are ridiculously good. I listened through the wall.”

  I pulled a chair over to the window and looked down. The detective was standing by her car looking up at me. I sat down quickly hoping that she was nearsighted. I knew I’d have to deal with her before this mess was over. She wouldn’t see a vampire and think “janitor.” Not this one.

  “Did she say anything earlier about little kids being kidnapped?”

  “Dude, don’t you, like, read the paper?” Tommy used the remote to elevate his bed so he could see me better after I took the chair.

  “My morning delivery leaves a little to be desired. Enlighten me.”

  “There’s been, like, ten or eleven kids go missing in the last month, dude. There’s talk of not letting anybody go out for Halloween unless they catch whoever’s taking them.”

  That would suck. Halloween is one of the best nights of the year. It’s like a Vegas buffet, only everyone you nibble on has had so much candy they all taste like dessert. I took the lid off his dinner plate and poked around at the leftovers, hoping for a little Jell-O. “Go on.”

  “What are you doing? I thought you couldn’t eat.”

  “Old habits. Now about the kids?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, the first couple were no big deal, their parents were all over each other about custody anyway, so most folks figured one or the other was lying and had swiped the kid. But then a pair of twins vanished out of a day care, and people started to get worried. By that time, everybody was making a huge deal about the cops not caring because the first kids were black, and the latest kids were white, and it got to be a whole big thing. The cops made a task force and held press conferences, and made a big news thing out of everything. But while the cops were conferencing, kids kept disappearing. Hey, can you hand me that ginger ale?” He took a drink while I looked at him.

  “Is that all?” I asked when he didn’t continue.

  “What do you mean? I guess. That’s what I know, anyway.”

  Sometimes I wonder if everybody in the world is brutally stupid, or if it’s just my clients. “Your demon and this bunch of disappearing kids might be connected.”

  “No, man. That was, like, a demon or something. This is just some kids going missing. Oh! I get it! You think the demon might be taking the kids, right?”

  It’s almost cute how excited stupid people get when they figure something out. Like Christmas for morons. “I was thinking that maybe the people calling the demon might have something to do with the vanishing children, yes. How many did you say were gone?”

  “I don’t know, man. They were all little kids, like middle school. I didn’t really pay attention, ‘cause I didn’t know any of them. But I did kinda know this girl whose little sister got kidnapped. I think they said she was number eight or something like that.”

 
; “Does your friend have a name?” I had the beginnings of a plan, but I needed to be able to leave Tommy alone and know he was safe. He was a moron, but he was my moron for the moment.

  “Dude, she’s not my friend, I barely know her.” I motioned for him to go on, because I didn’t care. “Janice Reynolds. My buddy Rick used to go out with her or something. Or maybe hooked up with her at a party. I can’t remember. But she lives in that new development over by the high school. What are you gonna do?”

  He held out his ginger ale and waited. I finally put it back on the tray for him. I hate pretend invalids.

  “I’m going to go talk to your friend Janice. But I’ve got a couple of other stops to make first, and I need to make a little noise so your guard will come back. Try to make this convincing.”

  “Make what convincing?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I put a pillow over his head and counted to twenty. He thrashed around pretty well, but wasn’t anywhere near smart enough to press the call button for the nurse. After he passed out, I made sure that he was still breathing, pressed the call button myself and threw the armchair out the window. I figured that would be enough to draw attention even at a hospital, so I wheeled my mop bucket in the opposite direction from where all the people were running and ducked into a stairwell to make good my escape.

  Chapter 9

  I walked past the crowd of people looking at the armchair that had crushed the hood of a police car in front of the hospital and headed toward the bus stop. The cop car was a nice touch, if I do say so myself. I thought my luck was finally starting to look up as I got to the bus stop, but my phone rang and proved me wrong again.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Dude, you gotta get over here!’ Greg sounded more than a little freaked out, but he freaks out when he burns a Pop-Tart.

  “Slow down. One, where are you? And two, what’s up?”

  “I’m at Tommy’s house, and the cops are here! They’re talking to his parents about a string of kidnappings. They think Tommy might be involved, and they’re talking about taking him out of the hospital and arresting him!”

  Great. “Is there a woman detective there? Tall, ponytail, boots, attitude?”

  “Yeah. She’s a real ball-buster, man. She’s got Tommy’s mom in tears and his dad all freaked out about college scholarships and lawyers and that crap.”

  “Don’t sweat it. She’ll be leaving any second.”

  “What are you talking about? Wait, there she goes. How did you . . . ?” Greg trailed off.

  “I’ll explain later.” I looked up and down the street, really wanting a bus to arrive before Detective Kickass got back to the hospital. “Now here’s the plan—go knock on the door, and when Tommy’s dad answers, mojo him into not seeing you, then deck him. Leave him out cold in the doorway, and then break a couple of windows. Get the hell out of there and meet me at home. We’ve got work to do.”

  “What?!?” I held the phone away from my head as Greg freaked out again. I counted to ten, and when he paused for breath, I put the phone back to my head.

  “Do it, and meet me at home. I’ll see you in half an hour.” I hung up, and when I didn’t see a bus anywhere, stepped out into the street in front of an oncoming car. The poor banker-type slammed on the brakes, and I pulled him out of the car. He started to say something, but then took a look in my eyes and fell silent, like a rabbit staring at a wolf.

  I didn’t plan to snack on him, but it had been a long night, and I was still really hungry. And that deer-in-the-headlights look got to me. I grabbed him by the tie and pulled him in. I spoke to him, not really saying words, just noises meant to calm the prey while I sniffed the side of his neck, smelling the fear-sweat and listening to the blood pulse in his carotid.

  I took a quick glance around at all the cars in the parking lot, all the people milling around, and decided this would really have to wait. I looked into his eyes and whispered, “Sleep.” He sagged like a sack of slightly overweight potatoes, and I tossed him into the passenger seat of his BMW SUV. I hopped in the driver’s seat and headed off toward home with a plan in mind and dinner next to me.

  I didn’t go all the way home, obviously. There are good ideas, and there are bad ideas. And for vampires, leaving a car with your last meal in the front seat parked outside your lair definitely falls into the “bad idea” column. I drove to an alley behind a biker bar called The Thirsty Beaver a couple miles west of our place and got into the back seat behind my meal. He was still out cold, so I grabbed his left hand and brought the wrist to my mouth with little fanfare.

  Feeding is a basic need, and not deserving of androgynous and mildly homoerotic adjectives. A man’s gotta eat, plain and simple. And what this man has to eat is human blood. I normally would have raided the blood supply at the hospital, but all the police there had made that a little too high profile for my tastes.

  I pulled his wrist to my mouth and licked the place at the bottom of his forearm where the veins run closest to the skin. I used the left wrist because between the rapid healing inherent to vampire bites and the fact that this yuppie wore an expensive watch, I figured there were better than even odds that he would never notice he’d been snacked upon. Not that anyone would believe him, but I tried to keep things neat when I could.

  My canines extended into razor-sharp points, and I tore as small a hole as I could while still letting the blood flow. It splashed against the back of my throat all hot and coppery, and the thick syrupy liquid went down as smooth as twenty-year-old scotch. And as a matter of fact, I could taste a little hint of scotch. Somebody had been driving while intoxicated—bad boy.

  It had been a while since I drank from the source, and it was good. Greg doesn’t approve, so whenever we’re together I drink from the bag, but man, there’s nothing like the taste of fresh blood right from the vein. It’s hot, with that metallic and salty taste that’s like nothing else in the world. We can live on blood bank supplies, but it’s the difference between a really good rare filet mignon and a frozen hamburger patty. I drank for a couple of minutes, just a couple of pints, and then leaned back in my seat behind the yuppie, who was still out like a light.

  “Was it good for you?” I asked my sleeping dinner. He was as silent as I expected him to be, which was good for both of us. I probably would have flipped out had he woken up at that exact moment, and it’s usually not a good idea to be the human trapped in a car with a freaked-out vamp. I took a minute to make sure I hadn’t dripped anything on my shirt, steal the snack’s wallet and leave him behind the bar. The Beaver had enough hipster traffic that one more SUV wouldn’t draw too much attention until closing time, and by then I’d be miles away.

  I tossed his wallet minus the cash in a dumpster and headed home. Now I had bus fare to get home on, but since I was close, I took it at a quick jog and was there in fifteen minutes without breaking a sweat. The four-minute mile is a big deal to human runners, but it’s pretty much a warm-up pace for dead guys.

  Greg was waiting for me when I got home, and he was practically bouncing off the walls. “Apartment” is a generous term for our home, I suppose. We live in the basement of a caretaker’s house in a local municipal cemetery. Municipal cemeteries work best for our brand of lurking, because they’re not consecrated ground. We can hang out there. Greg and I figure we can cycle through as the “caretaker” every dozen years or so, just to keep the folks that own the cemetery from getting suspicious about the fact that we don’t age. We fixed up the basement with a couple of hidden entrances, and outfitted it the way we wanted. The caretaker’s cottage is decorated in vintage redneck, so anyone stopping by sees exactly what they expect to see. On they go, and no one gets in our way.

  I made up some story for the cemetery owners about being an insomniac writer with an online poker addiction, so they leave me alone when I never go outside in the daytime and am up all night. They don’t really care, as long as the graves stay mowed and clean, and I subcontract that work. As long as we don’
t charge anything for our “maintenance services,” they don’t charge us anything to live there. It’s a pretty sweet deal, if I do say so myself.

  “Dude, what the hell took you so long? I’ve been going nuts here waiting for you!” Greg had an Xbox controller in one hand, but hadn’t even bothered to turn on the game. He usually crushes the games, but obviously tonight he was more interested in what I had to tell him.

  “Sorry, had to stop for take-out on the way.” I sat beside him on the couch and picked up the second controller. “What are we playing?”

  Greg was having none of that and grabbed the controller out of my hands. “No frickin’ way, man. What is the deal, and what are we going to do about that man-eating woman cop?”

  “I don’t know what the deal is yet, but I’m starting to get the idea that our little demon chasing Tommy is just the tip of the iceberg. And I’m pretty sure that our distractions will keep the detective out of our hair for a little while. Hopefully she’ll be busy chasing after whoever busted up Tommy’s house and jumped out the window of his hospital room long enough for us to get to the bottom of all this.”

  “But I busted up his house, and I guess you broke his hospital window . . .” My partner’s book smart, not street smart, but he’s damn loyal and has super-powers, so I keep him around. Besides, he’s been my best friend since sixth grade. We met getting stuffed into adjacent lockers in gym class. Even then, his was a tight fit.

  “You broke the hospital window,” Greg repeated as understanding dawned on him.

  “Now you get it. So we need to find out everything we can about these kids that have gone missing. Tommy said there were ten or eleven of them, and that’s why the cops were after him so quickly. You get online and see what you can dig up, and I’m going to go interview the sister of one of the earlier kidnap victims. Then we crash for a little while and try to catch up with Dad early tomorrow night. Sound good?”